In his article “Occupy first. Demands come later” in the Guardian of 26 October 2011, Žižek writes:
“They are dismissed as dreamers, but the true dreamers are those who think things can go on indefinitely the way they are, just with some cosmetic changes.” Exactly! Things cannot and will not be going on the way they are. People resist change. They cling to the status-quo. Even Oxford professors accept the status-quo as the norm. What I don't understand is how Žižek still argues for borders after saying this? He also accepts we need to devise a politics of solidarity; he says “Refugees are the price we pay for a globalised economy in which commodities – but not people – are permitted to circulate freely.” So why doesn't he come to the most logical conclusion after this point? Is it because he too carries the fear he writes about? In the New Statesman of 13 January 2016, “Slavoj Žižek: The Cologne attacks were an obscene version of carnival” he writes: The western middle class ideology has two opposed features: it displays arrogance and belief in the superiority of its values (universal human rights and freedoms threatened by the barbarian outsiders), but, simultaneously, it is obsessed by the fear that its limited domain will be invaded by the billions outside, who do not count in global capitalism since they are neither producing commodities nor consuming them. The fear of its members is that they will join those excluded. This observation is spot on too. I do not wish to be excluded either, I just wish the others to be included. So the question boils down to deciding where you stand on the issue of migration. I'm sorry but there is no middle ground in this. Standing with refugees only or proposing solidarity while keeping the #InjusticeAtBirth and #GlobalApartheid is only hypocrisy. You either accept selfishness and forget about international legal obligations... OR, you accept that the burden is on us as the relatively well-off and be ready to pay the price for the moral imperative of our time. Make your choice: Is it justice or laws of the jungle? * The Real Hypocrites
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